Evolution review: a stunningly beautiful allegory of sex and birth

Let me try to do what Lucile Hadzihalilovic almost certainly doesn’t want us to do and explain what’s going on in her latest, wholly wonderful mind-wrecker. Women are sea creatures. Boys are, when approaching puberty, treated as if in danger from some chronic disease. Men don’t seem to exist. Food is sludge.

All this might be feminist metaphor, but, as a stunning last shot clarifies, there is a world elsewhere that looks a little more like our own. So, maybe the nightmare is just a nightmare. Sometimes a mass of women that comes together to form a writhing quasi-kraken is no more or no less than it seems to be.

Still, Evolution does appear to be firmly set in allegorical space. Shot in Lanzarote, the film takes place in a timeless village that a giant thumb looks to have smeared across the black hills in clean chalk. The largely deserted streets suggest the utilitarian surrealism of Giorgio de Chirico's paintings.

Nicolas (Max Brebant), the young protagonist, occupies a stark interior with his female carer – probably not really his mother – that could serve as the setting for one of Beckett’s more severe plays. (Note how the table at which he consumes his wormy goo faces the wall.) Hadzihalilovic could not make it any clearer that she is bringing us to an archetypal Nowhere.

Then again, much of Evolution is so stubbornly dark that almost anything could be going on in its Chiaroscuro corners. Manuel Dacosse, the gifted cinematographer whose brilliant work on The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears almost made that film watchable, is allowed to take full advantage of the wide screen and he responds brilliantly.

Few films have moved from the macroscopic to the microscopic with such enthusiasm. A long shot of the bay allows just one tiny pink figure to break up the beautiful murk. An intense close-up of a minute sea creature advancing on a human gland plays like a David Attenborough broadcast from Hieronymus Bosch Island.

All of which peripheral discussion can only delay analysis of the plot for so long. It is 12 years since Hadzihalilovic's previous feature, the unforgettable Innocence. In that time she has contributed to the script for Enter the Void, directed by her husband Gaspar Noé, and shot one impressive short, but her distinctive cinematic voice has, otherwise, remained unheard.

Evolution is more opaque than Innocence, but considerable more disciplined than Enter the Void. What happens is puzzling, but the events are as confidently arranged as those in a Kafka short story.

We begin with gorgeous undersea foliage oscillating in the shifting tide. Nicolas swims down to the seafloor, where he seems to encounter the body of a boy. Later he is fed revolting food and given medicine by the person who might be his mother. He sneaks out at night and finds the women of the village writhing maniacally by the sea.

We subsequently discover that some (maybe all?) have valves down their back like sea creatures. Are they forming a collective beast?

Nicolas is taken to a hospital where the young nurses dig into his stomach, implant something suspicious (not to say “fishy”) and set to monitoring him with a dull, steampunk scanning device.

There is something of Shane Carruth's Upstream Colour in Hadzihalilovic's work. But Evolution is altogether more fantastic and other-worldly than that coldly logical slice of everyday surrealism.

Taken as a concise fable from a weird world, it works rather wonderfully. What kicks the film into the essential is, however, its constant adjacency to meaning. That is to say, it is forever on the point of making perfect sense, but never quite makes the final leap.

It’s a bit like life that way.